]]>On Monday, Apple will officially launch the Apple Watch, its first completely new product since the iPad was introduced in 2010 as well as its first major launch under CEO Tim Cook. Gigaom will be covering what Apple has in store live from the Yerba Buena Center on Monday.

But Apple actually introduced us to the Apple Watch back in September, and since then, Cook has spoken about the smartwatch several times in public. When he gets on stage in San Francisco on Monday to introduce Apple’s “most personal device ever,” some of what he’s going to cover will be new, and some of it he will have said prior, during the past six months as he’s been honing his Apple Watch pitch.

Here’s what to expect from Apple Watch, from Tim Cook, the boss of Apple himself (read it in a smooth-as-molasses southern drawl.)

On features

Apple CEO Tim Cook shows off the new iPhone 6 and the Apple Watch. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

I use mine to control my Apple TV. Another member of the team loves to use theirs as a viewfinder for their iPhone camera. Still another loves the walkie-talkie ability.

And so I constantly use Siri with my watch, and ask different things, and all of a sudden, y’know, it’s just there. You can do things like get notifications across your watch.

And if you’re interested in keeping up with the sports score to the financial markets to whatever it is, it’s like this, the Watch knows you’re looking at it, and it comes on. If I’m not looking at it, the Watch is off.

I sit for too long, it will actually tap me on the wrist to remind me to get up and move. Because a lot of doctors believe that sitting is the new cancer, right? And arguably activity is good for all of us. And so if you haven’t moved within the hour, ten minutes before the hour it’ll tap you.

And I think one of the biggest surprises people are going to have when they start using it is the breadth of what it will do.

You can make a call from the Watch… You can interface with Siri. Siri with this point comes back in a textual mode, but we’d like to do something different with that over time. But it’s cool for all of us, but I think it is going to be profound for some people.

Apple Watch requires the iPhone because it’s been designed to seamlessly work together, like with Handoff where you might read an email on your watch and then respond to it on the iPhone, the email appears right in the lock screen of your iPhone.

So if you’re just someone who wants to be a bit more active, or maybe you just want to track what you’re doing during the day, or perhaps you exercise regularly, or even if you are a very serious athlete, Apple Watch helps you live a better day.

We have two new applications in Apple Watch. The first is the fitness app. The fitness app monitors all of your activity and movement throughout the day. And the second is the workout app. The workout app allows you to set specific goals for specific types of workouts, like cycling or running.

So this is yet another way to begin to build a comprehensive view of your life, which should empower you to take care of yourself over time, and when you need help, it empowers you to take certain data to your doctor to get help from them.

If you think about the, for those of you can remember, the MP3 industry, before the iPod — we weren’t the first company to make an MP3…. And so I see the smartwatch category very much like that. There are several things that are called “smartwatches” that are shipping, but I’m not sure you could name any. Maybe you could. I’m not sure the audience could name very many. But certainly there’s been none that have changed the way people live their lives.

Now as we showed you last month, we have been working with selected third-party developers on Apple Watch. Like BMW, like American Airlines, like Starwood, and they’ve created some really unique personal experiences for Apple Watch.

Developers are hard at work on apps, notifications, and information summaries that we call Glances, all designed specifically for the Watch’s user interface.

My expectations are very high on it. I’m using it every day, and loving it, and I can’t live without it. And so I see that we’re making great progress on the development of it. The number of developers that are writing apps for it are impressive and we’re seeing some incredible innovation coming out there.

We always thought that glasses were not a smart move, from a point of view that people would not really want to wear them. They were intrusive, instead of pushing technology to the background, as we’ve always believed.

(Apple Watch revenue will be reported in the same category as Accessories, iPods, Apple TV, and Beats) But for now, in Q1, we’re not shipping any iPhone — excuse me, Apple Watches. And so it seems appropriate to start it that way. It also — to be also straight, is — I’m not very anxious in reporting a lot of numbers on Apple Watch, because of the — and giving a lot of detail on it because our competitors are looking for it. And so aggregating it is helpful from that point of view, as well.

The company will produce high quality video, images, and text for people to view in the Discover tab. Theoretically, it will provide more content for Snapchat’s advertiser partnerships. Furthermore, it will help the company establish itself as a place to consume content, so it doesn’t just have to rely on its partners creating media specifically for Snapchat. As previously reported, the company is working with CNN, Vice, Buzzfeed, and a whole host of others to help them tailor content for its upcoming Discover section.

The company has been snapping up journalists for the endeavor, which explains why long time social reporter Ellis Hamburger left The Verge for Snapchat in November. According to their LinkedIn profiles, blogger Nicole James, videographer Matt Krautstrunk, Dom Smith, and CJ Smith, former MTV producer Greg Wacks, and even animator Kyle Goodrich will be joining him.

I’m curious to see what they create. Snapchat’s disappearing, finger holding format doesn’t naturally lend itself to media consumption. These people will have to get creative if they want Snapchat to become a second screen.

The recent leaked news of a soured Snapchat deal with Vevo, to create its own record label, also makes more sense now. It suggests that the company will look towards creating its own entertainment content in addition to — perhaps — journalistic. Music videos and comedy sketches are likely to be a better fit for the younger crowd then CNN reports.

Snapchat isn’t the only tech company pursuing a platisher (publisher meets platform) approach. Medium has faced criticism for its similar approach, and as Digiday pointed out Tumblr’s former platisher efforts failed spectacularly in 2013.

]]>Neil Young’s high-definition audio startup Pono just started selling its Pono player, but the music legend told me during an interview at CES in Las Vegas Wednesday that he sees Pono getting out of the hardware business sooner rather than later. Asked whether Pono wants to continue to make its own hardware, Young said: “Not really. This is just so people can see what can be done. I would welcome the chance to have another company make this player.”

Young went on to say that he’d be happy to share Pono’s technology with other companies, and license the Pono brand. “It can say ‘certified Pono’ or it can say ‘branded Pono’. Those are the two things we offer, and neither of them are very expensive,” he explained.

Check out the full interview with Young:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZUY5vL7q-g]

Young said that he first thought about building the Pono when the MP3 format became popular around the turn of the century. He then started building a prototype four or five years ago. Young went on to announce Pono with an appearance on Letterman in 2012, but it took the company quite a while to actually get the product ready and out of the door.

In that process, Pono went through a number of CEOs, and is now officially headed by Young himself. Asked about that process, Young said: “It’s been difficult, we’ve made mistakes. But we are still here.”

]]>As part of its mission to convince the music industry that it isn’t just for copyright infringers, BitTorrent launched a new product in 2013 called “Bundles,” which allow musicians and other artists to combine free downloads with paid products. One of the most high-profile figures to experiment with this feature last year was Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who used it for his new album — and not only did he become the most legally-downloaded BitTorrent artist in 2014, but he may have made as much as $20 million.

What makes those kinds of numbers even more impressive is that Yorke didn’t launch his album bundle, called Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, until the end of September. By October — according to a comment on Twitter from an editor with Billboard magazine — the bundle had already been downloaded over 4 million times, and a year-end retrospective from BitTorrent says that the total number of downloads was 4.4 million.

When he released the album, Yorke said in a statement that he hoped the bundle would become an alternative to traditional music releases for more artists, saying it could prove to be “an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work [and] bypassing the self elected gate-keepers.”

The paid portion of the bundle, which included seven songs, cost $6 to download — meaning the total amount of revenue generated by the project could be as high as $26 million. Since BitTorrent gives 90 percent of the income from its bundles to the artist, that means Yorke could have made almost $24 million from the album. That’s far more than he likely would have made releasing it using almost any other traditional method.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple, as a number of music-industry watchers have pointed out: the $26-million revenue figure assumes that everyone who downloaded the bundle paid for it. But bundles also include free downloads — in Yorke’s case, a song and a video. And BitTorrent allows the artist to decide whether to release the exact breakdown of free vs. paid, something that Yorke has chosen not to do, according to BitTorrent’s head of content strategy Straith Schreder.

Whatever the actual breakdown of paid vs. free is, however, more than 4 million downloads is still a big number, and if even half of those who downloaded it paid $6 for the bundle then Yorke still made a substantial amount of revenue with very little overhead. It certainly makes BitTorrent’s bundle program look pretty good compared with other distribution methods such as iTunes, which takes a 30-percent cut of the proceeds.

Update: Glenn Peoples of Billboard magazine estimates that Yorke probably made between $1 million and $6 million on his album, based on the likely number of people who paid for it rather than just getting the free track. The low number is based on the proportion of users who pay for Pandora.

]]>When Google announced its new music subscription service, YouTube Music Key, it mentioned that subscribers would also get access to Google Play Music’s streaming service. Well, it looks like as if it’ll work the other way, too: Google has started sending notes to Google Play Music All Access subscribers that they’ll get access to YouTube Music Key, and during the beta period to boot. It’s unclear whether Google Play Music subscribers will get a crack at the introductory $7.99 price or if they’ll still pay the $9.99 that Google Play Music charges per month. If you’re not in that boat and want an invite to YouTube Music Key, you can sign up here.

]]>Playlist-centric personal radio service 8tracks relaunched its website Thursday with new ways for listeners to find DJs they like, and new analytics and real-time monitoring tools that aim to make the service more engaging for DJs.

8tracks is a bit like Pandora, inviting users to lean back and listen for free, but with a key twist: Instead of just automatically compiling personalized streams, 8tracks emphasizes DJs that upload tracks to the service and compile them to playlists. 8tracks CEO David Porter told me during a recent interview that this emphasis on human curation makes for a more focused experience. “You end up with playlists that are really deep,” he said.

Porter said that about one percent of 8tracks 8 million monthly active users make their own playlists. Another third of the audience makes collections of playlists and shares them with others, and the rest just comes to listen.

8tracks now wants to offer this casual audience a better way to find the DJs and playlists they like by suggesting relevant tags based on a user’s listening history. And DJs are offered detailed analytics on their audience that gives them a better idea on how many people are listening, and how they are interacting with a specific playlist.

Of course, 8tracks isn’t alone with letting humans help you find the right music for you. Beats Music put a big emphasis on human curation when it launched earlier this year, and Google recently acquired Songza to add human curation to its own Play Music subscription service. Porter told me that he sees premium subscription services and a free service like 8tracks as complementary, and that he could see himself partner with one of those bigger players at some point in the future.

]]>The French Spotify competitor Deezer, which recently launched in the U.S., has bought the on-demand internet radio and podcast service Stitcher. There’s no public price tag on the deal and, according to the Stitcher blog post on Friday, the acquisition wouldn’t affect its existing services. “You will still be able to use Stitcher the way you always have – on mobile phones, tablets, and in cars,” the San Francisco-based team wrote. Speaking of cars, Stitcher’s 35,000+ shows can be found in more than 50 models, it said in the post. Deezer has around 16 million monthly listeners, versus Spotify’s 40 million active users, but Deezer has greater reach, being available in 180 countries to Spotify’s 58.

]]>While it might seem strange for Pandora to be at an internet-of-things event, the music-streaming giant’s CTO Chris Martin was quick to remind the audience at Gigaom’s Structure Connect conference on Wednesday that being connected in as many places as possible was always a company goal.

“When we wrote the business plan back in 2004, we had this notion to have a radio service be ubiquitous to everyone and everywhere,” said Martin. “Sonos is a huge, important partner for us and was early on.”

But, Martin noted that many of the connected devices out there today don’t present an effortless way to experience Pandora; it’s not that easy to type in a web address on a remote control, for example.

Martin said that connected device manufacturers are showing an interest in making it easier to incorporate Pandora in a functional way. But Pandora’s not going to work with just any startup with a big idea. It’s important that startups consider whether or not their devices are going to be accessible for the common Joe and that their price point targets the 90 percent of the population and not just the 10 percent, he said.

The big opportunities Pandora sees in the home revolves around contextual relevance, which in this case, “The proprietary solutions aren’t going to play well in the long run,” he said. Pandora is looking for ways to tap into what those connected devices know about their users and how Pandora can use that information to make a better listening experience.

Even though Pandora’s algorithms currently focus on determining whether or not a particular song is one that a user likes or doesn’t like, Martin envisions a future in which the time of day, the season or even habits can help determine the type of music a person listens to.

“[You can] imagine a world in which you don’t have to select the station,” said Martin. “You just sort of know.”

]]>If your car is capable of getting an internet connection, then chances are it can stream Pandora. That’s not just some happy coincidence for the music streaming company. Pandora has made the automotive industry a big priority, and the results of the effort are obvious.

Since 2009, Pandora has partnered with 26 automotive brands, and 145 vehicle models have Pandora software loaded into their dashboards, including the top 10 best selling passenger cars in the U.S., according to the company. Pandora certainly isn’t in every connected vehicle out there, but no other third-party developer can claim that kind of presence in the automobile.

“We want to get as close to possible to the FM radio model as possible,” Pandora VP of automotive business development Geoff Snyder told me in an interview last week. “If Pandora was the last thing playing when you get out of your car, we want it to be the first thing playing when you get back in.”

A small but growing market

About 7 million Pandora users have listened to music through an integrated app in their cars – and that doesn’t count the users who simply plug their smartphones into an auxiliary jack in their car’s stereo system. That may not sound like a lot when compared against Pandora’s 250 million registered users or even its 76.4 million active monthly users , but it’s also important to remember that there are relatively few connected cars on the road today.

According to consulting firm McKinsey&Company, only about 8 percent of 1.05 billion vehicles currently on the road have any sort of internet capability. Connected infotainment systems have only emerged in the last few years, and those capabilities have been available largely in higher-end vehicles. If you buy a new Ford or Chevy today, Sync AppLink and MyLink are often options, but they’re by no means standard.

Source: McKinsey&Company

Compared to smartphones, tablets and PCs, the connected car market is still tiny, but Pandora is more interested in what it could become. People listening to music in their cars are more engaged than when music is playing in the background at home or at work, and that engagement could mean higher advertising rates. Average listening time is longer as well. As more cars become connected a good deal of internet radio traffic could transfer over to the dashboard. Pandora obviously wants to be leading that trend, not following it, Snyder said.

An App for every make and model

Consequently Pandora has done what few other Silicon Valley companies have been willing to do: deal with the byzantine world of the automakers. There is no unified development program for the connected car. Nor are there just a few major operating systems. Every automaker has their own proprietary platform and development program, and Pandora has joined almost every single one of them in order to optimize its service for as many vehicles a possible.

Pandora has been helped out by its own popularity, Snyder admitted. Even in the most closed development programs, it’s not hard to convince automakers that Pandora is a viable app in the dashboard. Pandora has even developed a generic client called Pandora Link that helps car companies to graft its service into their infotainment systems, Snyder said.

Pandora in one of its more sophisticated implementations in the Cadillac Cue infotainment system (source: GM)

In a typical implementation like on Ford’s Sync AppLink, Pandora remains largely on the smartphone, using the device’s radio for its internet connectivity. An accompanying bit of software resides in the dashboard, allowing app to tap into the car’s heads-up display and its command and control system. But as infotainment systems become more sophisticated, for instance Volvo’s new Sensus system, Pandora finds itself integrating directly with the vehicle, running on its OS and using its embedded data connectivity.

While customizing your code for every make and model vehicle might involve a lot of extra work, it’s work Pandora seems entirely willing to do. I asked Snyder what he thought of Google and Apple’s new automotive overlays Android Auto and CarPlay, which promise to greatly simplify the development process for cars. Snyder wouldn’t commit either way to whether Pandora was working with those platforms, but I got the distinct impression Pandora wasn’t that interested.

Pandora wants to optimize the streaming music experience on every car in order to get closer to the FM model of radio listening, Snyder said. If Pandora can better deliver that experience by integrating more closely with an automaker’s native operating system, Snyder said, then that’s what Pandora will do.

Analog broadcasting may seem like an odd technology for a digital streaming service to emulate, but the FM radio does have one thing going for it that Pandora is keenly aware of: It’s almost impossible to buy a car without one.

]]>Are you ready to start shopping for your holiday gifts? Consumer electronics companies definitely are ready for you to get out there, and many of them want you to add an internet-connected loudspeaker to your list. The only problem: There are tons of different products available, and very few of them play well together.

The potential and pitfalls of connected speakers

The idea behind a connected loudspeaker is a simple as it is powerful: Connected speakers can access online music services like Pandora, Spotify or Beats Music straight from the internet. Most people have been accessing these services either directly on their computers or mobile devices, or by piping music from their phones to Bluetooth-enabled loudspeakers.

However, Bluetooth is severely limited — take your device more than a few feet away from the speaker, and the connection drops. Get a call, and your speaker may jump into teleconferencing mode, blasting your conversation to everyone within listening distance. Bluetooth also is by its nature a one-to-one connection, meaning that the music can only be controlled by one device at a time, and only be replayed by a single speaker.

Bluetooth speakers drove the first wave of connected audio, but they’re also severely limited.

Internet-connected loudspeakers do away with these pitfalls by playing audio straight from the internet, in turn freeing up your phone for other things. You know, like phone calls. Most devices also support multiroom audio out of the box, making it possible to play the same music in the living room as in the kitchen.

The only problem: There are about a dozen of different approaches to internet-connected speakers. Most aren’t interoperable, and some are faster than others at adding the music services that consumers actually want. That lack of standards isn’t just a problem for music fans who are looking to upgrade their home stereo; it also makes it much harder for music services like Pandora to support this next generation of devices, as Pandora CTO Chris Martin is going to tell us at our Structure Connect conference, which is happening on October 21 and 22 in San Francisco.

Who are the contenders?

The number of companies trying to sell connected speakers seems to be growing by the week as the holiday season approaches. Without listing each and every speaker, its best to think of them as being part of four major camps.

Team AllPlay Will the future of home audio could be defined by a chip maker? Qualcomm is definitely trying, and has thrown its hat in the ring with its own technology solution dubbed AllPlay. Last week, Qualcomm announced that Monster will use AllPlay to power its first line of internet-connected speakers, and crowdsourced Wi-Fi operator FON will add AllPlay-compatibility to its new Gramofon social music router in the coming months. (We have Fon COO Alex Puregger at Structure Connect and will ask him more about his company’s plans for Gramofon.) AllPlay is still missing some major music services, including Pandora, and it looks like its initial focus will be more on Europe than the U.S.

Fon’s Gramofon social music router.

However, Qualcomm is in this for the long haul, as the company not only hopes to sell its chips to loudspeaker makers, but also wants to use the speaker as a kind of trojan horse to bring connectivity to other devices. “We are building AllPlay with the internet of things in mind,” Qualcomm’s Product Management Director Gary Brotman told me during a recent interview. Brotman not only cited the obvious example — making your devices talk to you through your speakers — but also other possible applications, which could include sending album art to your TV, or synchronizing your connected lightbulbs with your music playlists.

Team Play-Fi Qualcomm’s AllPlay is getting some competition from Play-Fi, a wireless audio solution developed by DTS, which is probably best known for powering audio systems in theaters. DTS differs from AllPlay in that it wants to take a different approach to how the audio system interacts with mobile devices: Eventually, DTS hopes to partner with carriers and handset manufacturers to gets its software directly embedded into your phone’s system, making it capable of routing any audio to your speaker — think of it like Bluetooth, but without the reach problem.

Polk’s S2 speaker, which is powered by Play-Fi.

However, it may take some time before these products come together. In the mean time, DTS is busy striking alliances with services like Spotify and Pandora as well as speaker manufacturers like Polk and Definitive Technology, both of which were announced last week. DTS Play-Fi General Manager Dannie Lau told me recently that by the end of the year, there will be more than 20 Play-Fi speakers available in the market.

Team Sonos In the world of connected speakers, Sonos is the defending champion. The company has been defining the category with its own hardware, and struck partnerships with all the major music services. Sonos has been slow to open up and offer others access to its SDK, and there is no interoperability between Sonos speakers and those made by other manufacturers.

That insular approach, which can be compared to Apple’s way of doing business, has so far helped Sonos. Consumers know that Sonos products will definitely work with other Sonos products, and once they buy into the ecosystem, they’re poised to buy more Sonos speakers as they connect additional rooms in their house.

The rest of the pack Aside from Sonos, AllPlay and Play-Fi, there are likely more than a dozen other companies in the market pushing their own devices and standards. Some of these are big names; Samsung has its own multiroom audio strategy, as does Sony. Others are upstarts looking to differentiate themselves with unique takes on connected audio, like Beep with its click-wheel that brings Pandora to every speaker in the house or Aether with its smart Cone that promises to learn from your music listening. And then there are companies like Pure that aren’t household names in the U.S., but that are backed by big companies and that partner with CE manufacturers like Onkyo to capture a piece of the market.

These are just warmup laps

With all these contenders, shopping for speakers could get complicated this coming holiday season, which is why many people may opt for the brands they know, be it established speaker manufacturers like Polk or connected speaker pioneer Sonos. Chances are that stores will already pre-select a few winning propositions. Retailers really want this to work like Bluetooth, where you don’t have to explain different wireless protocols, compatibility issues and music service partnerships, said Lau. “Retailers will be a driving force in this.”

Lau predicted that the battle for connected audio in the living room will be decided within the next 12 to 24 months. “Two or three of these technologies will survive,” he told me. That’s an assessment that Qualcomm’s Brotman can agree with. “Starting in 2015, you will start to see platforms and standards emerge,” he said, adding that things may heat up going into the next year.

If you want to learn more about the battle for the living room, join us at Structure Connect on October 21 and 22 in San Francisco, where we will have Sonos CEO John Macfarlane, Pandora CTO Chris Martin, Fon COO Alex Puregger, Qualcomm Technologies EVP Murthy Renduchintala and Chromecast VP Mario Queiroz, among others.